Supreme machine

[Johnimus Prime]

PC is the supreme gaming machine. End of.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7960498.stm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7962180.stm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

well, for a bit anyway probbably

[heavy_the_hobbit]

This has long been established!

[Keasis]

FYI, the 2nd link is an aprils fools gag. My mate sent it to me earlier, but he neglected to see the obvious reference to actors/directs on the company profile page.

[Johnimus Prime]

FYI, the 2nd link is an aprils fools gag. My mate sent it to me earlier, but he neglected to see the obvious reference to actors/directs on the company profile page.

You may be right, but 1) it's March and 2) I'm aware of a number of developers designing games to be played through your web browser - the most prominent at the moment being Quake 3. The idea being that all the heavy duty processing will be done on the host server so you will be able to have a high quality gaming experience through your web browser.

I'll check it out later when I can be arsed

[LazyEagle]

I think it's completely legit!

While I'm quite dubious about how well it would work, the theory is sound.

I imagine you'd need a really fast internet connect to run it in any playable way though, not to mention that connection being multiplied greatly if you wanted to play in HD.

Personally, I don't think the infrastructure is there just yet!

[Jonnywhy]

FYI, the 2nd link is an aprils fools gag.

You may be right, but it's March

Class

[Johnimus Prime]

more associated stuff

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7963302.stm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[LazyEagle]

and an article about why it probably won't work from Eurogamer:

Article on why Cloud Computing just wouldn't work for intensive games.

==
I love industry-shaking announcements. I love new, game-changing
hardware, and I'm absolutely, almost literally exploding with
excitement about the new OnLive gaming concept. I love that front-end,
and I love the way OnLive uses video because video is what my company,
Digital Foundry, specialises in, and what I spend a lot of my time
experimenting with. I want this to be brilliant so much that it's
almost painful.

The concept is remarkably simple. The actual hardware generating the
visuals and running the gameplay isn't owned by you. Instead it's held
somewhere else in the world. That hardware then encodes its visual
output and beams it to you over the internet. The player sitting at
home simply uses an existing PC or Mac (or 'micro-console') to take
the video stream over IP, beaming back control inputs to the server.
The advantages are very straightforward - you don't need to upgrade
your hardware, the people running the servers do. And that hardware
can be state-of-the-art PC kit way in advance of what Xbox 360 or PS3
are capable of, and of course it's upgradable. You'll never need to
buy a game again; you'll just rent time on the ones you want to play.
You'll doubtless save money and the publishers will make more of it.
Piracy will be impossible.

There's only one slight problem. Realistically, there is no way it can
work to the extent suggested, and no way it can provide a gaming
experience as good as the one you already have without inherent
compromises. It's a great idea, and an intriguing demo that is amazing
in that it actually works at all. However, away from the concept and
the tech demos running in controlled conditions, OnLive raises so many
technical questions and seemingly overcomes so many impossible
challenges that it can't possibly work.

In essence, we're looking at several very specific challenges for
OnLive to overcome - challenges that are either massive in scope, or
technologically beyond the very best minds of their respective fields.
For this to work, we're talking about a generational leap in not one,
but several fields of technology.
The Hardware Question


To give the kind of performance OnLive is promising (720p at 60
frames-per-second) realistically its datacenters are going to require
the processing equivalent of a high-end dual core PC running a very
fast GPU - a 9800GT minimum, and maybe something a bit meatier
depending on whether the 60fps gameplay claim works out, and which
games will actually be running. That's for every single connection
OnLive is going to be handling.

So, let's say that Grand Theft Auto V is released via OnLive, and
(conservatively) one million people want to play it at the same time.
We can talk about Tesla GPUs, server clusters, the whole nine yards,
but the bottom line is that the computing and rendering power we're
talking about is mammoth to a degree never seen before in the games
business, perhaps anywhere. There may be a way how this can be handled
(more on that later), but even having capacity for 'just' 5,000
clients running at the same time is a monumental effort and expense.
It would be the equivalent of us running a single Eurogamer server for
every reader who connects to the site at the same time. The expense
involved is staggering (not to mention the heat all this hardware
would generate - think of the children!).
The Video Encoding Conundrum

Not only will these datacenters be handling the gameplay, they will
also be encoding the video output of the machines in real time and
piping it down over IP to you at 1.5MBps (for SD) and 5MBps (for HD).
OnLive says you will be getting 60fps gameplay. First of all, bear in
mind that YouTube's encoding farms take a long, long time to produce
their current, offline 2MBps 30fps HD video. OnLive is going to be
doing it all in real-time via a PC plug-in card, at 5MBps, and with
surround sound too.

It sounds brilliant, but there's one rather annoying fact to consider:
the nature of video compression is such that the longer the CPU has to
encode the video, the better the job it will do. Conversely, it's a
matter of fact that the lower the latency, the less efficient it can
be.

More than that, OnLive overlord Steve Perlmen has said that the
latency introduced by the encoder is 1ms. Think about that; he's
saying that the OnLive encoder runs at 1000fps. It's one of the most
astonishing claims I've ever heard. It's like Ford saying that the new
Fiesta's cruising speed is in excess of the speed of sound. To give
some idea of the kind of leap OnLive reckons it is delivering, I
consulted one of the world's leading specialists in high-end video
encoding, and his response to OnLive's claims included such gems as
"Bulls***" and "Hahahahaha!" along with a more measured, "I have the
feeling that somebody is not telling the entire story here." This is a
man whose know-how has helped YouTube make the jump to HD, and whose
software is used in video compression applications around the world.

He recommended a series of settings and tweaks that would allow for
h264 processing at the kind of latencies OnLive has to work with, so
here's a comparison video: source on the left, 5MBps 60fps encode on
the right. As is usual with my videos, the action is slowed down to
eliminate macro-blocking on playback as much as possible. Burnout
Paradise is the chosen game, which features heavily on OnLive's
front-end demo, and is also a good test for arcade-style video.

60FPS video comparison
View this video on EGTV

It's not particularly pretty, but with the constrictions OnLive has to
live with, this is the sort of performance the current market leader
in compression has to offer. The bottom line here is that OnLive's
'interactive video compression algorithm' must be so utterly amazing,
and orders of magnitude better than anything ever made, that you
wonder why the company is bothering with videogames at all when the
potential applications are so much more staggering and immense.
The Insurmountable Challenge: Latency

OnLive says that it has conducted years of 'psychophysical' research
to lessen the effects of internet latency. That's the key issue here,
and I can't see how OnLive can fudge its way around this one. In
reality, it's going to need sub-150 millisecond latency from its
servers at least, and a hell of a QoS (quality of service) to
guarantee that this will in any way approximate the experience you
currently have at home. The latency factor will probably need to be
somewhat lower than that to factor in the video encoding server-side,
and decoding client-side, which by any measurable standard right now
is going to be impactful.

How Did They Do That?

So, bearing in mind that OnLive is demonstrating at GDC, how is it
achieving the results? It's difficult to say, but this is how I would
do it. Firstly, I'd have a bank of whopper PCs behind the scenes
running the games at 720p60. Each of them would be connected to a
hardware h264 encoder which would in turn be connected via gigabit LAN
to the clients. If the server-side PCs aren't on site, I'd have them
at a very close-by datacenter. At the GDC demo, OnLive bosses Mike
McGarvey and Steve Perlmen said that the company's servers were hosted
50 miles away. If this was a true test conducted over the internet,
I'm betting that there was a whopping internet connection being used
with oodles of bandwidth, even if only 5MBps of it was utilised.

Perhaps this suggests an element of smoke and mirrors, but if I were
OnLive and about to give a demonstration of this importance, I'd
definitely be looking to control as many of the conditions as
possible. The main principles are being showcased, but in a best-case
scenario. The thing is, actual performance has to live up to this demo
and that's where things get tricky.

Factor in thousands more users, orders of magnitude more traffic at
the datacenters, and all the vagaries and unreliability of the average
internet connection and actual real-life performance must surely be in
question. Much as we all want this to be brilliant, the fact of the
matter is that even a Skype call over the internet is prone to failing
badly at any given point, so the chances are that the far more
ambitious OnLive is going to have its fair share of very tangible
issues. Picture quality will be immensely variable and lag will remain
an issue - but for the less discerning gamer, maybe - just maybe - it
will work well enough.
How Could They Make It Work?

So, could this system actually live up to the claims being made for
it? What sort of conditions are required to ensure optimal
performance? Firstly, I don't think that the video encoding issues
will be overcome and I don't buy into this 'interactive video
algorithm' geek-speak. On high-action scenes, you're going to be
seeing a lot of macroblocking; it's basically inevitable. I can't
imagine Burnout ever being streamed in HD to acceptable standards at
60fps without at least two to three times the amount of bandwidth
OnLive uses.

I can see 30fps video being the standard here rather than the mooted
60fps. It'll make the video quality look massively superior, and
reduce the load on the client decoding it, plus it will help manage
latency if the amount of frames being processed is halved. Plus of
course there's the fact that 90-95 per cent of console games run at
30fps anyway. It's effectively the standard and it will lower the
CPU/GPU requirements of the PCs server-side. But even then, don't
think that this will result in lossless HDMI-quality video - far from
it. Any game with fast-moving, colourful video is going to look very
rough.

That said, the 1.5MBps standard-def option is intriguing and has a
much better chance of working out. Here's the same h264 encoding
profile I used earlier, reworked for standard definition. I can even
run this in real time in the Eurogamer Flash player, no slowdowns or
zoom-ins required.

SD 30FPS video
View this video on EGTV

Let's give OnLive the benefit of the doubt for a moment and say that
its encoder is better than the very best in compression available
today. If its tech is the generational leap that Perlman and company
say it is, maybe it could match that quality at 60fps. But still,
blown up to full-screen, it's not going to be especially impressive.

Latency. I can only see one way to make this work and guarantee the
necessary quality of service, and that's to adopt an IPTV-style model.
The OnLive datacenters will be licensed to ISPs, who will have them at
their base of operations. Latency will be massively reduced, the
connection will be far more stable, plus the datacenters with the PCs
and hardware encoders can be distributed worldwide in a more effective
manner. ISPs will be cut into the deal the way that retailers are now
with conventional game-purchasing.

But even in this scenario, practically, I still can't see it
happening. Microsoft's IPTV venture still hasn't materialised anywhere
outside of the USA, so what chance does OnLive have of brokering a
deal? And with ISPs complaining about the load brought about by
innovations like the BBC iPlayer, why would they want to be involved
with a hugely congestive venture like OnLive?

And what about computer costs? OnLive is promising state-of-the-art
PCs running your game experience. The costs in creating the
datacenters are going to be humungous, even factoring in the
assistance of a volume manufacturer like Dell or HP. And what happens
when GTA or Half-Life comes out and everyone wants to play it
simultaneously? Will we have to take turns on connecting to the
available servers? Computer costs, bandwidth costs, development costs,
publisher royalties... it's all starting to sound hugely, and
prohibitively, expensive. Not surprisingly, OnLive is keeping mum
about its cost structure to the end-user.
The Alternative


Let's say that I'm wrong. It's not completely unknown. I'm just a man
(flesh and blood!) taking a pop at visionaries who reckon they have
produced something truly epoch-making. But in order to make OnLive
perform exactly as claimed right now, the company has to have achieved
the following:
1. OnLive has mastered video compression that outstrips the best that
current technologies can achieve by a vast margin. In short, it has
outsmarted the smartest compressionists in the world, and not only
that, it's doing it in real-time.
2. OnLive's unparalleled grasp of psychophysics means that it has all
but eliminated the concept of IP lag during its seven years of
"stealth development", succeeding where the best minds in the business
have only met with limited success.
3. OnLive has developed a range of affordable PC-compatible
super-computers and hardware video encoders that are generations
beyond anything on the market at the moment.

At some point, Occam's Razor, along with an ounce of basic common
sense, has to step in and bring an end to this fantasy, no matter how
much we want it to be true. OnLive boss Steve Perlmen remains adamant:
"Perceptually, it appears the game is playing locally... what we have
is something that is absolutely incredible. You should be sceptical.
My first thinking was this shouldn't work, but it does."

So let's put it this way - I can't wait to be proved wrong.

[Jonnywhy]

We shall see. I dont see how playing a game over several miles can ever be quicker than having it in your PC. Numerous lags in Guild Wars and TF2 prove this

[infidel]

can never be quicker, but can be 'as good'

if it can take up to 25ms to get from the back of the videocard to a viewable image on a shitty monitor, and you play online gaming all the time w/ 50ms latency, having the same latency for 'cloud gaming' would be possible and acceptable, but there are so many if's n buts I personally would never consider it, even if Irelands 3rd world broadband infrastructure were able to deliver

if you are in TeamUSA and have broadband, you can sign up for the beta though
http://www.onlive.com/beta_program.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

n then in a few mnths, tell us first hand how much it rocks or sucks